Price trends for incandescent/halogen lighting equipment?

Inspired by a posting by Adrian Sierkowski on this forum concerning price stability/ROI for lighting equipment...

It recently occured to me that basically all digital cameras (that I know of) are daylight balanced. And the current trend seems to be towards digital capture.

Everyone who has used conversion filters with tungsten lamps (incandescent/halogen) to get daylight color balance knows what a hack it is, light loss and power (and filter!) consumption and all...

What does this mean for owning native tungsten balanced lighting equipment? So far prices have been quite stable, so lighting equipment has always been a good investment. But will it stay like that? Used HMI prices always have been much higher, but it seeems to me that this trend has increased with all the Red owners looking for daylight balanced lighting equipment. Let's say I buy a used halogen Dedo kit for a 4-digit-amount of dollars now... with the 100 Watt dedos this kit will be basically useless once you start to filter the lamps for daylight... will anyone care for this stuff in 5 to 10 years?Yes, you can still use it with tungsten film. But the general demand on the market will dictate price, and in case everyone shoots daylight the market will be flooded with native tungsten balanced equipment.

I think most people are choosing lights at least in part, to match what they encounter in the wild. What I mean is that if I'm working in a house it makes more sense to use T lighting as opposed to swapping out everything for a daylight balance. The other issue with HMIs is the cost of the whole fixture; they're expensive and complicated v a tungsten source, so even if they do have a higher rental rate, you loose more money in the upkeep. Just my little take.

I like tungsten lighting as well: cheap, lightweight, no worries about color balance. Works great with film where you can choose D or T... but when you're shooting with a camera that's native EI 320 daylight balanced, when correcting this camera to tungsten this would be around EI 80. Or the other way round, when lighting for EI 500 you'd need to set the camera to EI 2000. You can also use the camera unfiltered, but this will still lower the sensitivity/dynamic range, because the usable range is defined as the area where none of the color channels either clips or drowns in the noise floor.Maybe dynamic range of the camera will grow so large that you don't have to worry about any of this. But I somewhat doubt it...

Honestly, Marc, It's something that I haven't ever seen on the vast majority of digital cameras. some are better than others, but for the most part, it's been imperceptible. And, as mentioned, Tungsten is far more flattering on skintones to my eyes. I think the whole daylight issue ihas become overblown in our thinking because of the RED, much in the same way as we're now over-thinking resolution etc. Even the Red on the "M" under T light wasn't horrible. It wasn't great, of course, but it wasn't unusable either.

Indie feature shooting on two RED cameras, entire lighting package was heavily biased towards Tungsten fixtures. Few HMI were larger units, 4k, 12k, kind of overkill for interiors, very few Kino's. Very litle use of CTB on the Tungsten fixtures.

Stephen, how do you come to this conclusion? It may be that Red's M sensor is especially problematic here, but the general issue exists with all digital cameras so far?

Hi Marc,

I took over a small TV show shooting with 4 x EX3's , all tungsten lights, because of heat I am running now the lights at 50%, white balance says 2600K can't see any noise at all. I want to open the lenses wider so will probably play with the lights at 33-35% soon!

Red started from scratch with the M sensor, the MX sensor does not have an issue or any DSLR I have ever owned made by Nikon, go figure!